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The Ancient Watcher
Long has my vigil been. Why the gods gave me a life to rival theirs, I know not. I remember clearly now the moment my eyes opened. It is the purpose of my kind to remember. My kin are all gone, their memories are my own now. Our lives have been changed time and again as those I must call mortal have come to grips with their lives. I have witnessed courage to make my heart fail. I have seen evil so foul, I still feel unclean millennia after those actions have faded from legend. I opened my eyes to chaos being shaped. Vast figures standing tall, shaming mountains in their majesty, sing in voices to great for my mind to comprehend. Around us writhes unformed mass. Time as it is understood now fled by. How long the figures had sung, how long I witnessed their song, I cannot guess. Whole eons may have flared and died as darkness and light became the heavens. Beings that mortals call primordials began to appear, it is at this point I first recall the thought of being an individual, separate and unique. Before the vista formed a world. Tiny to the backdrop of the vast figures, yet large enough to give scale to mortal life. Mountains rose and I suddenly felt a vast sense of down, and I found myself standing on earth. Primordial beasts, some of virulent green growth, some of liquid rock, others of more wonderful substance lurch around me. Their terrible movements bringing both violence and creation. An age of these creatures formed the unique foci that have been in the heart of this world. I became aware of others like me. We are apart from the primordial beings. We are all linked. We all praised the vast beings, realizing they were our creators. They seem to have little interaction with us. The vast music they made shifted now, a voice breaks from the ranks, though it remains in tune with the vast harmony. Winged creatures appear. Fire in their bellies, magic their play thing, they swarm around the vast figures of the primordial forces. At first they keep to the harmony of the vast Song. But slowly a change befalls them. They begin to fight. The first Dragon war was a terrible thing. Slowly lines of alliance became apparent. Those whose skins were of colored scaled opposed those with metallic scales. A senseless division. Thousands of the firstborn died. The tempo of the Song increases. Now under the feet of the primordials the ancestors of the mortals arrived. The magics of the dragons brought many of these early mortals under thrall. The rapidly increasing mortals soon formed armies of thousands. As their draconic lords threw them at each other, new melodies suffuse the Song. My Kin exalt as we find an understanding of courage and hope. But at the same time a deep disharmony quivers through our bodies. Fear, hate, rage battle the majesty of courage. Amid the tumult I feel one like me learn of Fauna. Beasts of many shapes and sizes emerge adding to the chaos of the world. The Elder, the first of my kind, now does something that we did not know we could. He dies. I can see his life flowing through my mind. In the wake of his life, a new thought comes. Peace. It fights the magics of the dragons. Those who have been slaves subdued their masters. New thoughts cultivating crops. Education. Slowly mortals pull themselves from meager existence to awareness of the greater magics of living. From the minds of the mortals rise the ideas of civilization. Cities appear. But in this new calmer land the primordials cannot understand the difference. They blunder in causing chaos among the mortal races. Elements of fear and protection drive mortals to fight the masses of chaos. From the death throes of the primordials new features sprout among the landscape. Unnatural mountain ranges. Seas of living water. Some of the more enigmatic primordials give birth to other planes. At my very base, no one of my kin, a primordial dies and its powers, released so suddenly, creates what mortals call the Fey-wild. Where the primordial expired is the closest that the two planes exist. As the primordials are hunted the peace from the Elder’s death fades. Chaos and strife spill into all the lands once more. Several of my kin loose hope. They give up their life-forces. Unlike the passing of the Elder, no peace followed. A break in the the world appeared. The memories of these kin are tinged with emptiness, an absence of emotion. It is during this age that the phenomena known among mortals as the Bleak first appears in the world. It drifted over the world. Until it found the ill-fated city of Bre’Thalena Kair un’Tanth, the great monument to the escape of mortals from the clutches of the dragons. Even scholars have forgotten how the mortals living there turned on each other. Their powers, physical, mental, spiritual, magical, spill into the Bleak. The last moment I knew of Bre’Thalena Kair un’Thanth claimed another of my kin. Since that day, the Bleak has ravaged the world, sundering realms of mortals from each other. Against that terrible, unthinking force have risen the legends of mortal races. In some realms, horrid magics have enslaved living and dead alike. In others wild magics have enchanted the world. In Sur Salin, the mortal lands where the Fey-wild was born, come the legends of the Winds of Sur Salin. Out of Erenoth, the realm once under the heels of the ☀Kasrin Empire, come the great heroes known as the Provokers. And in the weary, dulled lands of Dragongrin, the Copper Jackals come to life as unlikely, even unwelcome heroes.